I wish I could use D for everything

[Steve Teale]

Jason House Wrote:

> Walter Bright Wrote:
>  
> > D aims to reduce project costs by reducing training time and shortening 
> > development time.
> 
> It really hasn't worked out that way for me with D2. Here's an example from yesterday:
> 
> I picked up where I left off with creating a weak ref library, something most other GC'd languages have as part of their standard library. It probably comes as no surprise that I was getting seg faults. Of course, those are supposed to be trivial to solve. I run the app through gdb, and catch the crash. I can see the stack but can't figure out which line the fault occurred on or what the important local variables are set to. 
> 
> I make up an incorrect theory of what could be going on and start a detailed sifting through all actions of the gc. Everything was fine :( I somehow notice later in the night a small usage difference between my code and the GC. I fix that and try a better test to ensure things work.
> 
> I see previously working code is now broken. I start checking code and settle on std.conv being broken. Out of the 15 candidates for to!(T), I overlook the one that should be used, but do spot what is incorrectly being used. The code looks legit - do a conversion to a string from a struct, but only if it lacks a toString function. I have a to string function! I test the logic with a static assert and it's wrong. Is this a compiler bug? I remember some screwy is expression syntax and try that instead. Looks like the screwy syntax is needed. I have always hated the is syntax because it's non-intuitive. It looks like Mr. Metaprogramming (Andrei) got it wrong. 

I tend to agree about the obsessive concern in this newsgroup about meta-programming. In my view, the whole focus of that is to automate code generation that really can't be automated if you care about speed and efficiency because it always has to assume worst case. Usually, when programmers in a conventional shop do use it, they use it to generalize a quite narrow case - KISS.

When it aims for the wider case, it often ends up being buggy, like std.stdio.writefln(...) has been from time to time.

Sadly, in the absence of decent development tools for D, many of us depend on a plain old editor, and writefln() for debugging.  I notice that in Phobos, Walter tends to prefer printf(...) - go figure!